Jean Sebastien Bouchard writes about the birth of Grisvert his new company. He uses the five breaths design model that we teach within the Art of Hosting to tell the story of his journey from idea to launch over two years. ALong the way, he uses Otto Scharmer’s work on Presencing and U Theory and Dave Pollard’s Natural Enterprise thinking to find clarity. To me this is a great story about what is possible with maps, intention, friends and openness.
It’s a brilliantly told case study, a great story and Grisvert is a great offering to the world.
Congrats JS!
Back in April, I got to be a part of one of the best hosting experiences of my life when I joined Tuesday Ryan-Hart, Toke Moeller, Monica Nissen, Phil Cass and Tim Merry and a bunch of others in designing and hosting the 2008 Kellogg Foundation Food and Society Conference. The other day Erin Caricoffe, one of the staff members of the core team we worked with sent out this summary of where we are now:
By all shared accounts, the 2008 Food and Society Gathering for Good Food was a success, meeting planning Team goals of providing a relevant, inclusive, and highly participative event, and in the larger, movement-wide goals of defining where our work currently stands, and where it must go to collaboratively progress towards a healthy, green, fair, and affordable food system for all people.
To help weave our work into the national consciousness, we posed hard questions of self-definition, movement-wide strategic thinking, and personal responsibility within the conference framework. Our speakers supported these questions, challenging participants to be inspired towards change and confident in furthering it. Thoughtfully crafted Learning Journeys enabled many to step beyond their desk-bound days to re-examine and experience the shared core of our work. The technologies of Open Space, Good Food Village Square, and Good Food Cafes shifted us from prescribed idea sharing to permit a more personal stake in not mere talk, but work in the moment, of the moment, with long-term vision. We all took our turn asking attendees to participate more than they had before at such an event; thank you for your creative assistance in making this happen to such great effect.
The gathering intended to provide and ignite a crucible for systemic shift towards deeper, more meaningful connections that will sustain the good of our communities; towards co-creating the bigger picture of the Good Food Movement; and finally, towards experiential co-learning through conversations, visual harvesting, performance poetry, dedicated blogging, and sharing nourishing meals at the table. With defined intentions and shared commitments, our efforts to make it so were strengthened, and many goals met. We sincerely thank you for these efforts, your sharing of time and wisdom. And so shall our steps continue, following this collective lead. Together we will continue”
This gathering’s success is quite obviously an achievement earned through the hard work of many, of you: Planning Team members and our talented core of Art of Hosting facilitators, speakers who came from different locales and different backgrounds, authors who overturn the rocks that drive our knowledge, the maverick leaders who embraced ad hoc strategic planning in leading Good Food Village Square Sessions, the many persevering Learning Journey hosts who gave extra effort in order to connect with dozens of visitors, the hard-working Wild Horse Pass Sheraton crew, and last, but not at all least, the welcoming community of Native American generations who graciously hosted us at a most appropriate and inspired location, allowing authentic, challenging work to take place.
We, the Good Food Movement, are a living, breathing model of diversity, heart, and cooperative engagement for common good. Thank you for your efforts in helping us all realize this, and challenging us to maintain our necessary work!
This work was truly the next level of conference design for us, a completely participatory and challenging gathering and I’m so take with Erin’s description of what happened there.
We’d like to invite you to join us for an Art of Hosting workshop here on Bowen Island in September. Myself, Monica Nissen, Caitlin Frost, Tenneson Woolf and David Stevenson will host you here at Rivendell Retreat Centre for three and half days of learning, exploring and playing with the art of hosting and harvesting conversations that matter.
Please grab the invitation, share with others and consider joining us. You can also register online through the Berkana Institute website. And if you are already registered, leave a note in the comments to let folks know who is coming. Confirmed participants already include bloggers, facilitators people working in business, tribal communities and in the food sector.
Jean-Sebastien is alive with rock balancing. He and his mates are decorating the whole campus with sculptures. He has become one of our rock balancing senseis here at the Institute and it’s very cool to see what he is learning from the practice. Today, just before our module started, he was sitting with me in the centre of the circle and he asked if here was something to knowing which kinds of edges would sit together, and as he took his mind off the task of balancing, in the act of asking the questions, the rocks he was working with came together. Very cool. It’s a strong metaphor for hosting practice too.
Our module today moved from the personal to the relational and we spent some time in appreciative interviews looking at the characteristics of conversations tat lead to shift. We used some integral quadrants to harvest the results of these conversations, and a harvest team went to work making some meaning for the group. We left them in a little chaos at lunch time, inviting them deeper into the practice of collective harvesting and we’ll see where it goes tomorrow.
This evening was a time for catching up with mates. David Stevenson is here with me, a guy I have worked with closely over the past five years with the Vancouver Island Aboriginal Transition Team. He’s in my friend Tom Hurley’s module and is cracking some questions about the kinds of governance structures that serve agile organizations in living systems. Tonight we spent some time sitting on rocks overlooking the Bedford Basin and talked about what was at the living core of our work. Probably more to come on this, but the big insight today was in cracking the nature of what we have been talking about as “the fifth organizational paradigm.” We have long suspected that there is something that transcends the four organizational paradigms of circle (reflection), triangle (action), bureaucracy (resourcing) and network (informtion sharing, learning and collaborating). David has been speaking as the fifth paradigm as a living ecology where all four of these come to play, where all four exist in the service of what is alive. The fifth paradigm is the place where these four act in concert to serve the living core of an organization. I’m liking this a lot.
In closing, here is the poem I slammed out as the cafe harvest yesterday:
Time to be in it
Chris Corrigan
Time to reform, see our relations reborn
from the inside out watching repression die into clarity
wet in the eyes where
hope falls in
and old worlds shed their skins
and we sit in the raw light of the new.
This is what we’re going to do.
Hang on to each other through the chaos
of fucked up panic that plays us
like dupes into not knowing the truth
that everything we do is a choice.
I’m here to meet hearts
that choose authentic restarts.
Different is on its way, starting right now and later today
and tomorrow as we fly
from uplift to sorrow
we’re called into balance and focus,
hard work and hocus pocus where the magic meets the tragic
and challenge appears and our spines straighten
and urgency seers its invitation upon us.
Start here.
It’s getting late and the state of things
requires that sensitivity attention brings;
the precision of decision
the gift of the incision that cuts the bonds to the old –
something climbs…
These are the times.
We are served by our fear, present and here
and escaping the fantasy of skill
letting the messiness fill
the spaces that lie between us.
The flux between optimism and the cynicism that
paralyses our lives,
leaves us to foster the faster
speed of work and communicate the state of things:
listen to the planet’s song. It fills our structures
and brings along a new life that comes when we fall
into the possibility that the micro births the macro,
the large from the small.
Practice moving to courage from fear
letting go of what is no longer clear.
Back to your corners
find those of like mind and appear together
as good people, impatient but kind.
Everywhere it is time to collaborate
create and elaborate
containers of capacity that resonate.
Time to come home, switch it on
dance between poles, rest in centre,
this time of change is a mentor
teaching courage to
reach back to places where each
small effort is supported by this trembling field.
Our tools are not enough – the challenge remains:
connect to source and course through each other’s veins.
A poem harvested from participants’ reflections from a World Cafe at the Shambhala Institute for Authentice Leadership, June 2008.
Wicked fun day here today at the Shambhala Institute for Authentic Leadership in Halifax. I’m here as faculty teaching a module on the Art of Hosting with Toke Moeller and Monica Nissen. Highlights of the day included being asked to create a slam poem harvest from a World Cafe with all of the participants today, running the first day of our module and then singing tonight on stage with Judy Brown, Tim Merry, Mark Durkee, Shauntay Grant and Mary Jane Lamond (whose music I have loved for 15 years) and others. We were up on stage tonight in a mixed spoken word and song cafe performance, the highlights of which were Basia Solarz’s version of “over the Rainbow” and Shauntay’s incredible spoken word reminiscences about her childhood. We finished the night with a sweet jam on Tim and Mark’s “Switch it On.”
I’m loving how much actual art is in my life these days, especially as it relates to hosting work. One participant shared with me that she felt my impromptu poem harvest was as vivid as a graphic facilitation, which is high praise indeed, but also points to the power of words to evoke a shared meaning, if they are put into a poem. I continue to play intensively with this form of harvest.
Our module is based on the journey of the practitioner from individual to systemic work, and it looks at things that are constant at every scale. Today we started with the journey of the practitioner, opening with a check in circle, going to the chaordic path teaching and then finishing with some aikido to capture the learning of what it’s like to move with ground and centre. There were rocks balancing in the centre of our circle, an activity which is a very fast teacher about artistic hosting practice. One of our module participants, Jean-Sebastien Bouchard came alive with this practice, and he’s been balancing rocks all over the campus.
So a great week so far, following on a really interesting faculty retreat and some time with friends down at Tim’s place in Carleton. It’s a long stretch to be on the road but I’m in heaven here, learning tons, making lots of friends and playing at the edges of my life, art and work.